Browsing All posts tagged under »A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge«

On medium and large scale projects, requirements management can become a difficult overhead. Teams that rely on spreadsheet and word-processing software to create and manage requirements documents often find it difficult to maintain the traceability and inter-dependencies between requirements. We all know the value of tracing, tracking and maintaining our requirements documents, but until now […]

Equally at home with Use Case creation, or the earlier generation’s database analysis, Data Dictionaries and Glossaries provide a common place to store and retrieve definitions. They’re used by business and technical roles. The premise is to understand what is needed for a field of data or an entire table or record of data (aka […]

Business Rules. Universal definitions or process descriptions that transcend a single use case or process flow. A little bit bigger than a glossary definition (such as income range, gender, ethnicity) but not quite a usage scenario in its own right. Business rules as they’re refined, adapted and updated are invaluable requirements assets – they really […]

Focus Groups – the 11th Technique listed in the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge employ a skilled facilitator(s) and a small group of prospective or current customers to seek out and understand what the customer or user wants and/or how they use a product or service. The information gathered from a focus group is powerful. […]

Polls, surveys, questionnaires are synonymous terms for the same thing – asking people for their opinion on a topic. Chapter Nine of the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK®), Second Edition includes Surveys and Questionnaires as the 31st technique. Surveys help teams understand what customers want. They will differ depending on whether they will […]

Several years ago I shared a series of articles in the Rational Edge for IBM that showcased real life applications of use cases and incremental development. Two of those articles focused on replacing a legacy unemployment insurance system. The entire article provides a much more thorough introduction from that example – so take a quick […]

The whiteboard. The dry eraser. The multi-color pens. The overbearing meeting participant. Those four things often come together when thinking of brainstorming. It’s a technique among multiple management nexus disciplines and at the heart of agile, business analysis and project management. It can produce great results from a team. The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge […]